Comcast

Intranet rebuild using headless architecture in Sitecore CMS

Comcast, the largest broadcasting and cable company in the world, required a global intranet solution that could better serve the needs of its 150K employees and align with its expectations of what could be done on the modern web. GeekHive worked with HUGE Inc. to assess Comcast’s entire internal digital footprint to establish a content approach, technical strategy, marketing plan, and scalable technical roadmap to ultimately create an appealing and engaging corporate intranet. The end result was a highly personalized app store like experience designed to boost employee engagement and deliver important tools and information.

Partner

Services

Social Integration

Content Management Systems

Custom Application Development

Single Sign On Authentication

Personalization

Headless CMS Integration on Sitecore

356

Tickets Logged

2

Agencies Collaborating

100K+

Daily Users

437

Cups of Coffee Consumed

3

Geeks

Employee Experience Matters

Comcast’s idea for an updated intranet came from the question: How do we empower employees to quickly and efficiently find relevant information about their interactions with Comcast?

Understanding the importance of creating an environment where employees felt heard, nurtured and excited to come to work everyday Comcast wanted to focus on making the onboarding process easy, and building brand awareness. They also wanted to feature engaging social media aspects including liking, favoring, and sharing abilities so employees would be more likely to interact with content and one another.

Out with the Old, in with the New

Comcast knows better than anyone that change starts at home. They’re responsible for some of the most groundbreaking broadcasting technologies in the world and they felt it was time to embrace that same sense of innovation to improve their internal user experience through their intranet. We supported Comcast to vet various platforms, ultimately landing on Sitecore because Comcast had institutional knowledge of the platform and it’s flexible and user-friendly for content managers.

Think you could benefit from a headless approach?

Create a “Wow” Factor with Headless Architecture

This was the first headless CMS we built as a company and it allowed us to utilize technologies like Angular to their fullest potential. WebAPI technology built in a SPA style created a seamless endpoint between Sitecore and Angular and we built a custom templating engine in Angular and JSON to replace Sitecore’s template builder. Using flat design, effective animations, and an easy to use interface we created a “wow” factor for users and set up the intranet to function similarly to a desktop application.

Delivering the right information, at the right time

With this modular content management approach, similar to an internal app store, users could easily customize their unique intranet experience based on interests and relevance resulting in a contextually personalized user experience. Each employee had a unique intranet homepage that showed news that was personalized to their interests based on who they were, their job function, the office location they worked out of, and previous searches that identified their interests. In addition to personalizing based on the information above, the system was intelligent enough to understand the org chart of the entire organization.

There were multiple content types that users would see, evergreen corporate content, job specific tools, payroll systems (only showing relevant information to each employee), expense reporting systems (based on office location), HR apps, personalized dashboard applications like area specific weather and personalized news feed content. Can you imagine how many hours that saved Comcast yearly going from manually having to update each employee to having a system that automatically shared relevant, streamlined information based on algorithmic data to each person?

A Phased Rollout Approach

Working in collaboration with Huge and Comcast the intranet was rolled out in a phased approach. We began with a pilot program for new employees asking: What is the experience like for new employees? How can we improve on it to make their lives easier? After getting user feedback, we made refinements and rolled it out to larger and larger employee segments until all users were on the new intranet.